Concept
Reification (fallacy)
Overview
Reification (also known as concretism, hypostatization, or the fallacy of misplaced concreteness) is a fallacy of ambiguity, when an abstraction (abstract belief or hypothetical construct) is treated as if it were a concrete real event or physical entity.
In other words, it is the error of treating something that is not concrete, such as an idea, as a concrete thing. A common case of reification is the confusion of a model with reality: "the map is not the territory".
Reification is part of normal usage of natural language, as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy.
A potential consequence of reification is exemplified by Goodhart's law, where changes in the measurement of a phenomenon are mistaken for changes to the phenomenon itself.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
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Now such a whole would be an effect (_product_) the _representation_ of which is regarded as the _cause_ of its possibility; but the product of a cause whose determining ground is merely the representation of its effect is called a purpose. Hence it is merely a consequence of the particular constitution of our Understanding, that it represents products of nature as possible, according to a different kind of…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Reification is; the author is tied to Reification in the knowledge graph.
147.] (γ) When this externality (of actuality) is thus developed into a circle of the two categories of possibility and immediate actuality, showing the intermediation of the one by the other, it is what is called Real Possibility. Being such a circle, further, it is the totality, and thus the content, the actual fact or affair in its all-round definiteness. Whilst in like manner, if we look at the distinction…
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, The Logic of Hegel
States what Reification is; the author is tied to Reification in the knowledge graph.
It almost reconciles one to being no logician that one thereby escapes so much abstractionism. Abstractionism of the worst sort dogs Mr. Russell in his own trials to tell positively what the word 'truth' means. In the third of his articles on Meinong, in Mind, vol. xiii, p. 509 (1904), he attempts this feat by limiting the discussion to three terms only, a proposition, its content, and an object, abstracting from…
William James, The Meaning of Truth
States what Reification is; the author is tied to Reification in the knowledge graph.
Philosophers who discussed Reification (fallacy)
Related ideas
- Belief
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
- Immanuel Kant
- Idealism
- John Dewey
- Gravitational field
- Paradigm
- Literature
- Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
- Metaphor
- Natural language
- Motivation
- Rhetoric
- Stephen Jay Gould
- Abstraction
- Universe
- Extension (metaphysics)
- Reason
- Alfred North Whitehead
- Utility
- Fallacy
- The Principles of Psychology
- Free Press (publisher)
- Ambiguity
Place in the tradition
Part of Essentialism.